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After a ****storm of two weeks, the thesis is coming along slowly. Today I managed to lose my keys and my dad’s umbrella-ella-ella and the morning’s fun and games had just began. I went into the Library today to look up 2009 papers. Turns out they don’t have them due to a recession-style backlog. My only option is to contact the main librarian fella and see if he can either (a) tell me when the copies will be available in microfilm, or

(b) get me a hard copy. When I called, I got an “out of office” reply until Tuesday so I will see how it goes until then. Despite this very real threat to my thesis, I’m remaining positive, but it really feels as if one obstacle is leading straight into another. The fact that it is due in six weeks time hardly helps.

Am frantically emailing the British Library and the Archives about getting access to the 1987 tabloids. So far our own Irish Archives have replied (fair play for the speediness) saying they only have Irish copies. This is a problem because there were no Irish tabloids in the ’80s. The British Library may be able to help me, but I am worried that it may require me to physically view the Archives. This would require me to physically go to London…

It would appear that I am procrastinating to the extreme with this. I have the headings of the sections I am to write about, but not one word done as yet. To further procrastinate, I’m off to the Archives in a moment to finish the Cork Examiner. I will then have the 1987 broadsheets completed. I am supposed to have this Literary Review done by the end of June… which I can sneakily stretch to the first week of July but if I’m honest I can’t really see it happening right now.

Like the title says. I have run into the first major disaster of my thesis so far. Of course it’s related to the f***ing tabloids. I went to the National Library like I have been doing for the past few weeks and asked for the March 1987 tabloids. These would be the Sun, Star, Mirror and Mail. It turns out that the Archives don’t have any of them! The tabloids were all British, with maybe a few pages on Irish-related articles. I’m fine for 2009 but I may have to look elsewhere for the 1987 tabloids. I found a few sites taht offer archives online but it looks like you have to pay for access. Boo-urns.

The Irish Mirror is the earliest tabloid available in an Irish context and its archives go back to 1993.

The Irish Star archives go back as far as 1999 and for some reason are published in Belfast.

For the past two weeks I have been here, at the National Library of Ireland, looking up archives of the newspapers from 1987. I’ve been focusing on the headlines, Editorials and Letters to the Editor in each paper (so far the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Cork Examiner). This is to focus on where framing occurs in the papers, and does this reflect the Budget. The time period is the Budget week. The archives to these papers is on microfilm. This is supposedly nice and easy to use, but the contraptions they have in the Archives often run of their own accord, rendering the viewer helpless in their viewing. Or else they fail to catch the end of the film and start running, potentially destroying the film itself. Or you as the viewer fail to install the film correctly, which leads to all sorts of problems.

So far you’d think it’s fairly straightforward, but of course nothing ever runs totally smoothly. On the first day, with the 1987 Irish Times, I must have chosen a faulty machine (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it) and I’m pretty sure I got a full knot in the microfilm. This is extraordinarily difficult to do, due to the mechanics of the micro film design. I was standing and re-assembling the thing about five times in total, most probably annoying everyone around me. That’s another thing that I noticed about the National Library. It was fairly full most days. So my idiocy was plain for all to see. The next day I saw that my machine was OUT OF ORDER. And I wasn’t the only one who had problems. Another day, an elderly gentleman from Clare was having issues. At this stage I had figured out how to use another machine so I was listening to my iRiver and working away when the LIBRARY WORKER asked me to help with installation. Immediately I noticed that it was the dodgey machine and pointed out that fact. After being (somewhat haughtily) assured that the machine was fine, we all attempted to install the microfilm with no success. You do meet some interesting characters there though. A very nice man with a lot of nose hair congratulated me on the notes I was taking. No joke, there does seem to be a nice “community feel” to the place. I think I need to get out more >_<

The last thing under the “umbrella” of framing is priming. To be honest, I didn’t know much about this until my supervisor brought it up as a potential category to look up. It’s not wholly different from framing or agenda-setting.

The concept of priming is based on the assumption that people don’t carefully weigh all possible aspects of a situation or problem when making decisions. Rather, people employ mental shortcuts when making up their minds. Every memory is stored as a node, and every node is related to another node by semantic paths. Nodes that are strongly connected to each other form a mental schema, an interpretative framework or a belief system. When an external stimulus, for instance a news headline, activates a node in this network, the entire schema gets activated and will serve as shortcut for making a decision. The more prominent the issue is in the media, the greater is its accessibility in a person’s memory.

Having explained what agenda-setting is, framing comes next. Framing is very similar to agenda-setting, but it comes from different theoretical roots. Framing involves dividing news stories into separate categories (frames) and these can then be categorized in order of salience (importance). By analysing all seven Irish newspapers for the Budget weeks of 1987 and 2009, I can divide the stories frame by frame. From this information I can determine if an “agenda” was present or not.